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Monday, September 27, 2010

This is my first tutorial on Unity, kinda nervous writing it... Anyway have you guys ever play Hitman, Dynasty Warrior, Starcraft or any RTS games? Usually at the bottom left of those games, there's a 2d map showing where the players are and where you're suppose to go etc.

Well, that's what I'm trying to write about today, how to make a simple mini map similar to that, instead of using the top down camera method. This comes in handy when you're trying to create a mini map to locate the player and the enemies (AIs) current position... Like Hitman, where you can see where everyone's heading from within a map.

First, import the "startPackage" into Unity, then expand the "My Scenes" folder in the Project view and open up the "tut" scene. There should be a "well" textured terrain with mountains, a prefab called "Enemy" in the form of a cube, a first person controller, and a game object called "Waypoints" which contains a bunch of other game objects with "w" follow by a number on their name inside. Click "Play" to play the scene, and you should see the cube starting to move by itself across all the waypoints in the scene.

Next, create a new Javascript file, name it "MiniMapScript" (or whatever that suits you). Double click on it in the project view to edit it. Now we are gonna create a few variables for the script (comments are added for explanation):

//For placing the image of the mini map.var miniMap : GUIStyle;//Two transform variables, one for the player's and the enemy's, var player : Transform;var enemy : Transform;//Icon images for the player and enemy(s) on the map.var playerIcon : GUIStyle;var enemyIcon : GUIStyle;//Offset variables (X and Y) - where you want to place your map on screen.var mapOffSetX = 762;var mapOffSetY = 510;//The width and height of your map as it'll appear on screen,var mapWidth = 200;var mapHeight = 200;//Width and Height of your scene, or the resolution of your terrain.var sceneWidth = 500;var sceneHeight = 500;//The size of your player's and enemy's icon on the map. var iconSize = 10;private var iconHalfSize;function Update () {//So that the pivot point of the icon is at the middle of the image.

//You'll know what it means later...

iconHalfSize = iconSize/2;
}

Those were the basic variables required to make the map works. You can try dragging the script to the FPS (First Person Controller) and then customize the GUIStyle variables with the textures I provided in the folder named "My Textures"; drag the Enemy from the Hierarchy view to the "enemy" transform variable in the FPS's mini map script, and the same thing for the FPS, into the "player" transform variable.

Now there's a few thing you need to understand before we proceed...
So what we are trying to do here is to take the X and Z (not Y) position of both the player and enemy, and convert them into the X and Y (again, not Z) axis of the screen (for the map).

When you look at the image above. it's like you're gonna flip the whole things up (Z and X to Y and X). I'm not sure if Unity has a function for what I just mentioned above, I know there's something called GUI.matrix4x4, but at the moment I was to lazy to find out, and I used the directly proportional method, to "convert them".

Under the Update function, add this line:

function GetMapPos(pos : float, mapSize, sceneSize) {

return pos * mapSize/sceneSize;

}

Basically what this line of function does is to take the position (pos) of the player, multiply by the height or width of the map, and then divide by the resolution (height or width) of the terrain, and it'll return back a value which we could use later to locate the player's position as it is on the map.

After that, create a new OnGUI function below the GetMapPos function, write these in:

The first line (GUI.BeginGroup) and the last (GUI.EndGroup) is to create a GUI group and placed it at the bottom right of the screen using the mapOffSetX and mapOffSetY variables in Rect(), and the GUI texture for it would be the miniMap GUIStyle which we just set-up earlier.

The second and third line (pX and pZ) is two new variables which has the returned value of the GetMapPos function...

The forth line (playerMapX) contains the information of the player's X-axis position on the map. It is minus by iconHalfSize so that we can have the pivot point of the player's icon which would appear on the map to be in the middle (looks more appropriate that way).

The fifth line (playerMapZ), like playerMapX, contains the information of the player's Y position on the map (it's written as playerMapZ to let you know that we are taking the player's Z-axis position in the scene, you can name it to anything you want actually).

Like what I've mentioned in the sketch I posted above (the one with the Z & X axis, and Y & X axis), when you are creating the map, you have to flip the Z-axis in scene vertically to make it the Y-axis in map. To do that, we multiply "pZ" with negative one (which would flip it), and then plus the mapHeight to get the value of the Y-axis in map.

The sixth line is to create a GUI.Box which would represent the player on the map, together with the playerIcon GUIStyle as the texture...

Those stuff should be enough by now. Click "Play" and you should be able to see a map on the screen, and a small, yellow, diamond-shaped icon on the map (the player).

Try to move around, and you should see the yellow icon move along too. If it didn't, check your line again, see if you didn't confuse the Z axis with the Y axis (unless if you choose to write it accordingly, instead of copy and paste).

If you understand what I've wrote thus far, you should be able to code the enemy part yourself. But if you can't, below is the full codes, copy and paste them to your script:

//For placing the image of the mini map.

var miniMap : GUIStyle;

//Two transform variables, one for the player's and the enemy,

var player : Transform;

var enemy : Transform;

//Icon images for the player and enemy(s) on the map.

var playerIcon : GUIStyle;

var enemyIcon : GUIStyle;

//Offset variables (X and Y) - where you want to place your map on screen.

var mapOffSetX = 762;

var mapOffSetY = 510;

//The width and height of your map as it'll appear on screen,

var mapWidth = 200;

var mapHeight = 200;

//Resolution (both width and height) of your terrain.

var sceneWidth = 500;

var sceneHeight = 500;

//The size of your player and enemy's icon as it would appear on the map.

And that's basically all... If you have any question (like an error or bug), drop me a message at leezhifei168@rocketmail.com, I'll try to answer to your problem as soon as I can.

Please be noted the final product will not look like one of in GTAs, but those in RTS games, where you have an entire big area in a small map. To do the effect like in GTA, you have to use a top down camera and some shaders, I'll try to post a tutorial about it later when I'm free.

Sunday, September 26, 2010

Again, a lot have been going on this week, first of all, my AIW's presentation was a big let down. I learned my lessons now, that people never appreciate the technology (inner) side of a game but more on the way it feels (outer). Both the tech and interface played important roles in a game, as the interfaces runs on the tech, and if the tech wasn't good, the interface wouldn't be good either...

Either way, game development, virtual reality, and some other stuff related to interactions are complicated and takes time to understand. In which I took my first step, by reading The Art of Game Design by Jesse Schell. I couldn't find the book anywhere in the stores so I downloaded a copy of it from somewhere on the internet, but as a book lover and collector, I'll definitely buy one in the future, cuz I still prefer holding the book than reading it off the PC screen...

One of the reason I think it was a huge success is because it gave me an experience of jumping off a building and... well... it was a really awesome game, but definitely not for people who are afraid of height though (yeah, it was 'that' scary).

I heard those "giving people experiences" stuff all the time in the Dean's Experiential Studies class, the Interaction Studies class... almost once or twice every week. But I guess it was tons of failures (I failed lots of time in my journey of making a good games) that leads me to finally listen to what they say. For instance, just now I was doing some game designs for my new game which I was planning to submit for the 9th Casual Gameplay Design Competition held on JayisGames. And this time it wasn't just plainly "sketch a few stuff" and "I've got everything in my head" stuff, but actually writing it down and plan to finish building everything before I make it (mostly because I was gonna make a puzzle platformer game, that's why).

Unlike before, this time I'm really gonna join the competition. Before this, I used to say that I will join but then ended up not joining in the end. Well, that time I was too over confident of myself... This time I'm seriously planning to venture into the indie game biz. Oh yeah, I even found myself a freelance music composer, and of course I have to give him a share whenever I won a competition or something.

Whether I'm going to win or not is still a big question, just depends on whether I can design a better game from now on (against millions of other indie game developers). Let's just see how it goes then!

Saturday, September 18, 2010

Instead of using a top-down camera, I use GUI and a little bit of math to calculate and convert the player's position as it'll be in the map. The math part is simple, it's just the idea of how to make it took me a while to figure it out.

Anyway, it'd been fun developing the map, I'll continue to finish the game ASAP, before the final submission date arrived.

Thursday, September 16, 2010

Just realized that I haven't blog for some time now. A lot have happen from the previous post till this. I'm currently developing a game for my course assignment entitled : "AIW". It's not a "good" game yet, but another experimental game for me to test out my skills.

This is the kind of game which was made just to pass up for my assignment. The final submission is next Thursday, around the afternoon time, so I've been rushing the assignment and hoped to finish it ASAP so that I can have time to study for my final exam which is also happening next week (sigh...).

Below is some snapshots of my progress of AIW, it's a small adventure game based on Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland (thus, "AIW"):

Been working on it for two months now (from game design, concept sketches, character design, modelling, texturing, environment design and programming, all in Unity3d).

And... yeah, that's all I have to say now, cuz my mind is all about AIW...